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I don't agree with everything Skidelsky (the author) writes, but his main point rings true: "Today’s professional economists... have studied almost nothing but
by cs702 10y ago
I don't agree with everything Skidelsky (the author) writes, but his main point rings true:
"Today’s professional economists... have studied almost nothing but economics. They don’t even read the classics of their own discipline. Economic history comes, if at all, from data sets. Philosophy, which could teach them about the limits of the economic method, is a closed book. Mathematics, demanding and seductive, has monopolized their mental horizons. The economists are the idiots savants of our time."
In other words, they lack what Charlie Munger calls "elementary worldly wisdom:" https://old.ycombinator.com/munger.html https://old.ycombinator.com/munger.html.
- TwoBit 10y agoAnd how do you know this?
- woodandsteel 10y agoI think the very unfortunate narrowness of economics has partly to do with its history. Economics got going before any of the other social sciences and also ecological science, and early on had an enormous practical success with the development of free market theory, and so got the mistaken idea that it could proceed just fine without these other sciences. Another problem is that economics is very closely connected to political policies, so it is very vulnerable to ideological influences.